Over 1,000 women in Chennai set a Guinness World Record when they crocheted the world’s largest blanket. The massive 11,148.5 square metres (120,000.98 square feet) blanket took six months to be crafted, and was completed on January 31.
The gigantic blanket, almost the size of a football field, was later disassembled into about 5,000 individual ones that were distributed to poor families. Most of the yarn for the blanket was donated by the women themselves, while some was gifted by Knit Pro and Ganga wool manufacturing company in Noida.
Women from across India and 13 other countries took part in the endeavour, which was the brainchild of Subashri Natarajan who spearheads the group Mother India’s Crochet Queens. The project started in August last year, inspired by the previous record set by South Africa in April 2015, where a 3,377 square meter blanket was crocheted.
The group of crochet enthusiasts included children as young as eight years to 85-year-old women. “I first approached my friends and relatives who know crocheting, but then the movement grew with people joining the Facebook group, and through word of mouth,” Subashri told The Hindu.